Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Too important to deny?

Does ethnicity matter? Consider the case of Tobias Hubinette. He was born in Korea but adopted as a child by Swedish parents. He has become a strident opponent of intercountry adoption. In part, he uses the issue to make politically radical attacks on the West. It’s clear, though, that some of his anger stems from his difficulties in forming an ethnic identity:

When we arrive in Sweden we have to give up our Korean identity … it is assumed that there are no special problems, emotional or psychological costs being a non-white adoptee in a white adoptive family and living in a predominantly white surrounding. Consequently, assimilation becomes the ideal as the adoptee is stripped of name, language, religion and culture ….I have the feeling that we are “stranded” here in the West … The question is not: Am I a Swede or a Korean? The question is: How can I survive as a marginalized East Asian in Sweden? We will never be considered as Swedes, and we cannot return to Korea.

There is anger too about the distorted pattern of relationships for East Asians living in the West:

The stereotyped sex roles are disastrous for us East Asians. The feminization and infantilization hitting both sexes, have direct consequences in our daily lives. East Asian men are desexualized … East Asian women are on the other hand hyper-sexualized …

Asian-Americans have the highest ratio of interracial relations. It is no surprise that this concerns Asian women, not Asian men. In some generations and ethnic groups as many as 80 percent of the Asian-American women have left their own community for white men. The consequence is that every generation produces a bachelor society among Asian men, and a huge number of Amerasian children.

Whites’ views on us East Asians have been taken for granted especially among us adoptees. The men feel ugly, while the women feel “special” … The men remain bachelors, while the women marry white men … being married to a white man is honestly speaking a one-way ticket into the white society.

Hubinette believes his own discontent is not uncommon among intercountry adoptees and produces research to back his claims. For instance, 61% of ethnic Swedes are either married or cohabitant, but only 28% of intercountry adoptees. 5% of ethnic Swedish women sometimes use illicit drugs, compared to 24% of adoptee women. Female intercountry adoptees in Sweden are more likely to suicide, the odds ratio being a considerable 4.5.

What can be done? The feminist parents of one adoptive child made special efforts to connect her to her country of birth:

Traveling all over with our daughter, we tried to soak up the very essence of her birth country. While she had the strong, stunning features of the people in the countryside, we wore the neon signs of tourists. We know a lot about her birth country. We have books, music, pictures and mementos, but we know not how to give her the deep, deep love of her birth country that can come so naturally to native people.

What I find interesting about this quote is that the child’s parents, as a matter of conscience, felt the need to provide their adopted child with a love of her country of birth. Would they have had the same concern for a biological child? Would they have recognised the same need to be connected to an ancestral place, people and culture?

Liberalism tells us that ethnicity, as an unchosen “accident of birth”, shouldn’t matter and that it should be something we are blind to. In some contexts this might be true, but it leads to a denial of important aspects of the human experience, particularly those concerning human identity, attachment and forms of “connectedness”.

The fact that ethnicity is something we don’t choose doesn’t make it insignificant in our lives.

I am white, and would like to have a family, preferably with a wife who shares my cultural and ethnic heritage, but I can't help finding most of the Asian women I meet and see as infinitely more attractive. Most of the white women I know are, I'm sorry to say, men. Their attitudes, everything about them. They are so unattractive. I don't want to marry or date any of them. I think one of the reasons why East Asian women marry into white society is because they are so attractive to Western men who are sick of the masculinised women in white society. One of the biggest blows to the preservation of white ethni is therefore not large-scale non-white immigration, but Western feminism.

Kilroy, don't give up on white women. The problem is worst amongst uni educated women in their early to mid 20s. A certain percentage of white women do begin to break from the orthodoxies they've had drummed into them after that, though. I've got a niece who for a number of years did the whole aggressive, cocky careerist thing. She has now, at age 26, declared that careerism is too stressful and that she wants to find a bloke (and she's gorgeous and smart). My neighbours have a daughter who couldn't be nicer or prettier.

Such women are out there. I know it's difficult, having met unsuitable woman after unsuitable woman, to keep trying, but it's just something that your generation has to do, whilst working to ensure that things aren't so bad for your offspring.

I knew a woman who was full of feminist, careerist, talk. She wasn't a radical feminist, but was full of "pushing barriers" and all that. Yet the truth was that what she really wanted was to marry a well off man, and be supported for the rest of her life. In case any feminists are reading this, I'm not imparting my views on her, this is clearly what she was after. Even her career choices were largely governed with putting her in a situation where she thought she would meet such a catch, whether he be a brain surgeon or top lawyer.

There are plenty of women like her, who talk the talk, but have no real intention of walking the walk - who complain about the "gender imbalance" of pay, but insist that the man must support the family. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I suspect on reason is that feminism is often sold as a one way street to fulfilment: "You can have whatever you want." There isn't enough talk about sacrifice in all this. If you have a "high powered career" it is bound to come at the cost of family life and a good relationship with your spouse. How can it not? "High powered careers" usually involve very long hours and high levels of stress. Of course this could all be blamed on "the patriarchy", but this is a little like claiming that Margaret Thatcher was "a man" because she wasn't what the sisterhood imagined a female leader being like. If you're going to sell the idea of careerism to women, they should also be made aware of the costs of it, especially if they marry a careerist man, which is generally the case.

This is why many single women I know have the idea that something has to be done about the "gender imbalance" for pay (although I'm quite sure from my own experience that women in the same job get paid the same as they would if they were male), but insisting that the man should support the family (any money they earn is there own apparently). I am not saying that all women think like this, but it is more common than you might think where women think they can have it both ways, and are therefore set up for disappointment.

I would tell Tobias that a man who is a victim and goes around whinging how he has been "desexualised", is not likely to be attractive to many women, regardless of his ethnicity.

If "Asian" women are attractive to "whites" it is likely a sign that they have not fully integrated into western culture, keeping some of their traditional values, like females acting feminine.

Of course, biologically, western women have the impulse to act feminine too, but their social indoctrination says otherwise. This is one of the ways that feminism has caused so much unhappiness among women.

As to the view that East Asian men end up as bachelors, it will be news to my brother in law!

Hubinette is more agenda-driven than science-driven, despite publishingin academia. He is driven more byemotion than honest curiousity. HeDOES pose interesting questions,however.

It is not strange that adoptees have a tougher time, they wereabandoned, and have to face theproblems all kids have deviatingfrom the norm.

PS. It is the insecurity which manyWestern females have of their sexual identity that makes themunattractive, not masculinization.Asian women don't have the same pressure from contemporary mediaand society to behave differently,they know who they are.Generally speaking, off course.